Unlearn your negative skills and habits

We are all affected by our surroundings and upbringing; the tricky part is how to absorbs (and nurture) only the positive parts and shed the negative ones. And when you have arrived at the conscious incompetence state, then letting go of the skills and habits that you've been doing like forever, but turned out they tend to corrupts instead of improving you, might be the most reasonable yet the most difficult thing to do.

So when you're poor and your competitors are giants, guerrilla marketing might be your only way out, a little shortcut here and there might be justifiable. But when you're finally grow big, sophisticated, and trying to win new markets, guerrilla warfare should not be the only strategy you have; or perhaps shouldn't even included in your options anymore.

Do you have habits or skills you mastered through the hard times, but now you know you should get rid of to make a real significant improvement? I believe you do, I believe we all do.

So likewise, when a brand had learned through its upbringing a glued and patched sets of User Experience for their customers that have keep them in business, but now they see that it flawed, or even hinder it to achieve further improvements, it might be a time to unlearn some old tricks, improves the ones that work, and create a new refreshed User Experience.

The most constant thing in live is changes; you can embrace it and create improvements, or you can avoid it and create setbacks. (byms)

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Aplikasi penting bagi para UX Designers

Even though you can do well with pencil & paper during the initial stages of UX Design, technology can saves your time and adds advantages which cannot be achieved by the manual tools. However, if price might be your main concern, especially when you're just starting out, or the company you're working for has tight budget on acquiring new software license, or simply is waiting for you to score that first project to get business running, then you need software applications that's both powerful, and free. Tough picks? Surely, but amazingly such great application exists! And here are my favourite choices:

1. XMind
   When you need to brainstorm for ideas, develop mind maps, or simply drafting the task flow or document IA, XMind is a wonderful tools. Equipped with easy to use, intuitive navigation, and very flexible structure, you can quickly harvest your ideas without less thinking about the technical matters. Equipped with keyboard shortcuts that has good conformity to both common sense and widely used standards, making operating this app is a breeze.


2. Pencil
   What? Electronic pencil to use with electronic paper? No it's not. Pencil is the Add on application for Mozilla based browser (that mean Firefox included) that's capable to do a GUI prototyping. While it might not be as powerful as Axure or other commercial prototyping tools out there, Pencil is surprisingly usable. With selections of available stencils to use, templating, and ability to export in either image or linkable HTML file, Pencil saves your time in rapid prototyping by offering templating ability, reusable stencils with common UI shapes (tab, drop down list, tables, buttons, check boxes, etc.), and easy operation. You can even use it to draw regular flow chart diagram.

Has any of you use those applications? Or do you have other tools you would like [...]

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Maintaining Blog and Social Media with less efforts

Blogging is hard, because it requires a writing skill; Facebooking is easy, because simply by updating mundane information as your status, you're exist on Facebook. Blogging therefore, is a practice you need to put more efforts into it, and harder to maintain; Facebook could be your quick way to connect to your audiences, and it's easy to maintain -- but one liner status and comments are also easy to forget.

Therefore if your goals is to establish a personal branding, then blogging (and blogwalking) is a very powerful tool.

If in the past you would require to publish a writing on a well-known magazine or newspaper to get noticed, blogging offer a lower entry barrier to be getting known; a name and (free) platform and space to host your writings, and you're all set to go promoting the most important brand you'll ever manage; yourself.

It would still requires you to actively maintain it, actively done SEO initiatives, and actively promotes it, but you can start it quick and painless instead of having to face lengthy process of article submission to the print medias. Not to include rejections.

But this doesn't mean however, that you should alienate everything non-blogging from your personal branding efforts, because we can't deny that to become known, you have to be exist in places where the crowds gathers; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Kompasiana, etc. But how could you maintain your existence in all of those places at once? At some time in history, this does mean that you should be "physically" exist there, creating different posts from one to another, interacting with different people at different location, thus resulting in much time spent for maintaining, instead of advancing forward. It requires a lot amount of time to spare; and with the list of the networking sites keep on getting bigger, you would hardly keeping up with them in short time.

So how you could you maintain your existence in multiple networks/sites, yet can still maintain it w [...]

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